An Analysis of Biechow LDS Microfilm By Film/Year/Event

by C. Michael Eliasz-Solomon

Its a rainy day today and Stanczyk threw himself at the unfinished Survey Spreadsheet of his grandmother’s ancestral village: Biechow (old woj./gubernia Kielce). So I made a pot of coffee and I started at the highest level.

My spreadsheet is for each of the years, 1792-1860 inclusive. So there is each year going down the leftside. I have each the three events: Birth, Marriage, Death (Urodzen, Malzenstwo, Zgonow) in separate columns. Please note in some years there are marriage banns (zapowiedz), so you may need to divide by three to get an idea of the actual number of marriages (round up to the next integer). The counts provided are the actual record counts in the church registers. For Biechow, I used LDS microfilm: 936660 .. 936664 inclusive (five film). Finally, I added a column of derived data, “Growth Rate”. This column is simply the number of births minus the number of deaths. Most years there is an increase. However, there are some negatives that show a population decrease. In one year (1831), I know for certainty, that there was a cholera epidemic. Hence a steep decrease in population in 1831. In other years, it may be pestilence/disease or it may be war or something else, but I have no info to explain the negative growth.